Privacy luncheon with Optus (22 Feb 2018)

Privacy luncheon with Optus (22 Feb 2018)

Privacy luncheon with Optus (22 Feb 2018)

The Optus Macquarie University Cyber Security Hub together with Optus held a special event on privacy and data handling on Thursday, 22 February 2018 with the appearance of Australian Privacy Commissioner, Timothy Pilgrim.

On the day the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme comes into effect, the Optus Macquarie University Cyber Security Hub and Optus organised a luncheon for leaders from business, government and academia. We were pleased and honoured to hear from the Australian Privacy Commissioner, Timothy Pilgrim who spoke about the significance of this new scheme andwhat this means for Australian business, large and small.

Finally, Prof. Dali Kaafar Scientific Director of the Cyber Security Hub and Research Group Leader at Data61, gave a seminar entitled "Privacy in Information-Rich Data-driven Organisations". Prof. Kaafar presented the latest R&D development in Privacy Preserving Datas-sharing, an industry McKinsey estimates to unlock $5-7 trillion of economic value across 7 industry sectors. Prof. Kaafar pointed out several misconceptions of the notion of privacy risks, and highlighted associated threats of handling and managing data.

Professor Dali Kaafar, Director of the Cyber Security Hub and Research Group Leader at Data61

He called out organisations to take a more mature approach when dealing with data privacy and highlighted the need for provable privacy guarantees when sharing data. He presented his work on privacy preserving synthetic data sharing that builds algorithms enabling provably private data sharing and that well approximate the original data distribution.

Building on a mathematically rigorous definition of Privacy, Differential Privacy, this work provides a reliable and efficient way to address increasing privacy concerns while preserving the utility of the data (A concept Prof. Kaafar referred to as the Pragmatic Optimist approach).

Prof Kaafar also explained how differential privacy has the potential to change the attack vs defence paradigm in cyber security by allowing organisations to work on synthetic data rather than the on original data, and thus moving away from the current Paradigm where data is the honeypot for cyber criminals.